Compute & Containers

• Horizontal Scaling for Databricks Apps (Status: Generally Available) You can now run Databricks apps across multiple instances behind a single unified URL with zero-downtime deployments and session affinity. This eliminates availability bottlenecks and significantly improves concurrency for production user-facing web apps running on Azure Databricks.

• Azure Virtual Desktop Classic Retirement (Status: Retiring) Microsoft has officially sunsetted Azure Virtual Desktop (classic) as of the 30th September 2026 deadline, blocking inbound connections to classic management plane resources. Workloads must be fully transitioned to ARM-based host pools to restore connectivity and management capabilities on Azure Virtual Desktop.

Databases & Analytics

• Lakeflow Jobs Table Update Triggers on OpenSharing & System Tables (Status: Generally Available) Event-driven table update triggers can now monitor OpenSharing objects and system tables directly to kick off downstream ETL runs. This simplifies lakehouse pipelines and avoids costly scheduled polling mechanisms across shared datasets in Azure Databricks.

• Query Tags for Databricks SQL Warehouses (Status: Generally Available) Workloads on serverless and classic SQL warehouses can now be tagged with custom key-value pairs that surface directly inside system.query telemetry. This introduces granular cost attribution and chargeback mapping for engineering teams utilising Azure Databricks.

Networking & Security

• Inbound Private Link for Performance-Intensive Services (Status: Generally Available) Azure Private Link integration is now generally available for high-throughput data paths, including Lakebase Autoscaling and Zerobus Ingest. This eliminates public data egress exposure while maintaining ultra-low latency enterprise network boundaries on Azure Databricks.

• Standalone Workload Sunsetting in Azure Communication Services (Status: Retiring) Microsoft has announced the phased retirement of standalone calling and messaging endpoints in favour of Teams-aligned architectures (such as Teams Phone Extensibility). New sign-ups for retiring standalone features close on 23rd October 2026, requiring architects to align real-time communication stacks with Microsoft 365 services on Azure Communication Services.

Governance & Management

• Unified Asset Tagging for Dashboards, Notebooks, and Genie Agents (Status: Generally Available) Workspace assets, notebooks, and autonomous agents now support both governed Unity Catalog and ungoverned metadata key-value tags. This centralises compliance auditing, operational taxonomy, and access governance across Azure Databricks.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) Extension Management & Concurrency Limits (Status: Generally Available) The latest CLI update introduces versioned gRPC extension contracts, dependency-aware uninstalls, and per-phase concurrency throttling for package and deploy runs. This prevents deployment race conditions and standardises CI/CD pipeline automation for Azure Developer CLI.

That’s a wrap on this week's Azure platform changes. I hope this quick overview helps streamline your upcoming engineering sprints. If you found it helpful, make sure to follow for future updates.

So far in the series, we've covered Subscriptions and we've covered Resource Groups. For the third entry in the series I want to cover tagging or tags, I skipped over these in my previous entry for this reason alone in that I wanted to do an entire post about tagging and well here it is! I'll cover what tags are, what they are for and why they are one of the most important elements in your journey to learning Azure.

What are Azure Tags?

First and foremost, tags are a form of metadata that hense the name you can tag onto your various cloud resources such as your virtual machines or storage accounts. Tags consist of a what are called a 'Key Value' pair, this pair consists of both a 'Name' and then a 'Value' key

• You can think of the 'Name' (or Key) field as a kind of title or category label. This will define the the specific property you want to track across your various resources, some common examples include: Environment, Department, or CostCenter.

• The 'Value' field provides the specific detail or data assigned to the name field, if we use the Department name as an example. The value field might say something like Finance as that resource belongs to the the finance team.

Now to show what that looks like in practical terms, here we have our example resource group. Under Tags, I've applied our Department name, and our Finance value. If I wanted to add more tags, then all I simply do is type in another name with a matching value and hit apply to my Resource Group.

Why do we need Tags?

Okay, but what's the point of applying tags to resources you might ask? Well there are a number of reasons you might want to apply tags to your various resources:

• First and foremost, Cost Management & Billing is one of the most common reasons tags are applied to cloud resources. By tagging certain resources with a specific tags like CostCentre it allow the finance team to see which department or team have spent what, are they under or over budget etc. through the billing menu within the Azure portal.

• While it's not strictly a feature of Azure Tags, I wanted to touch upon policy enforcement via 'Azure Policy' and yes, we'll cover that in a future post. But for what you need to know right now, enforcing tags to be assigned on resource creation via policy is a great way to prevent untagged/ unmanaged resources being deployed without say CostCentre applied first through the use of the deny or append within Azure Policy.

• Another very common use case for Tags is to utilise them in automation and operational workflows, while the core of the workflow would be managed through something like an Automation Account, topic for another day. You might apply tags such as Start-9AM or Shutdown-5PM to your Virtual Machines, each of these tags would then be linked to a workflow to power them up or down based on a schedule to help optimise your costs and time, instead of manually shutting them all down at the end of the day.

How to apply tags

Applying tags is a simple process, if you are just starting out with Azure, the easiest way to familiarise yourself with them is through the Azure Portal.

Here is a quick step-by-step guide to applying a tag manually:

1. Log into the Azure Portal and navigate to any resource, such as a Virtual Machine or a Resource Group.

2. On the left-hand navigation menu, look under the Settings heading and click on Tags.

3. In the blank text boxes provided, type in your chosen Name (for example, Environment) and your chosen Value (for example, Dev).

4. Click Apply at the bottom of the page.

That really is all there is to it!

As you progress further into your Azure journey, you will likely start deploying resources at a much larger scale. When you reach that stage, applying tags one by one in the portal can become quite tedious. You will eventually learn to automate this process using command-line tools like PowerShell or the Azure CLI, allowing you to tag hundreds of resources in seconds. For now, though, getting comfortable with the portal is more than sufficient.

Best practices

When it comes to deploying tags to your resources there are some best practices to follow, however most organisations will have their own take on those standards so my big piece of advice here is if you are deploying tags for the first time either in a professional environment or just in your own lab space for practice, establish your tag naming convention scheme early becasue it can get very messy very quickly if not kept organised, for example:

While Tag Names (Keys) are case-insensitive. For example, Environment and environment are treated as the exact same tag name by Azure, while Tag Values are case-sensitive (case-preserving). For example, a value of Production is treated differently from production under Azure's billing and reporting-which, if you’re a bit of a perfectionist like me, is enough to give you a minor eye twitch!

And finally, before you go completely tag-happy: Azure is generous, but it’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet! You’re capped at a maximum of 50 tags per resource or resource group, so treat them like prime real estate and make sure every tag truly deserves its spot

Closing Thoughts

While tags might seem like a minor detail, they are essential for managing a well-architected Azure environment—powering everything from clear billing reports to automation. My biggest piece of advice is to agree on a naming convention early and stick to it; your future self will thank you when you aren't untangling a mess of mismatched casing issues!

Wondering how to keep your Azure environment organised and efficient? Following our guide on subscriptions, this entry breaks down Azure Resource Groups—the essential logical containers for your cloud resources. We explore the straightforward creation process, crucial nuances regarding metadata regions, and how grouping deployments by workload simplifies lifecycle management. Discover how mastering this foundational practice directly drives both Cost Optimisation and Operational Excellence within your cloud architecture.

Getting Started

In the previous entry, we covered subscriptions, so naturally it makes sense that we now cover Resource Groups. In short, just like a subscription, you can think of a resource group as another sort of 'container', and these sit within or under your subscription (or subscriptions if you have multiple). However, unlike subscriptions, resource groups are primarily—as the name suggests—a method of grouping your deployed cloud resources, be that a virtual machine or a virtual network, into one logically assigned place.

How you logically group your cloud resources inside a Resource Group is up to you. Now, if you want to be a monster, you could 'technically' deploy everything into one single resource group and call it a day; however, it's no coincidence that Microsoft allows you to deploy up to 980 separate resource groups per Azure subscription. Instead, what is generally considered the best practice is that you group your resources by 'workload' or by 'application'—but what do I mean by that?

Real-world example

Let's use a real-world example: You have a retail store on the high street that sells groceries. Would it make sense to have all your spare stock stored on the other side of town? No, probably not! Not only would it be very inefficient running back and forth, but it would also put the stock at risk of damage and potentially even loss. A similar concept applies here for Resource Groups.

Resource groups allow you to 'group' together the resources required for whatever it is you want to deploy. Sticking with the retail store, but this time it's an internet-hosted retail store: you would want to keep your product database with the other elements of the store—such as your Azure App Service or Static Web application that runs the actual visual element of your store—together. This ensures that for any maintenance work, you know exactly which resources are related to that specific web store.

Creating a Resource Group

Creating a resource group is a very straightforward process. Simply open the Azure Portal and in the search bar type 'Resource Group'. It will appear in the drop-down list; then, simply click 'Create'. Once you're in the Basics menu, there are only a few options to choose from:

Once you're in the Basics menu, there are only a few options to choose from:

• Subscription: What subscription is the resource group being deployed to for billing purposes, you can read more about subscriptions here

• Resource group name: What you want to call the resource group. Top tip: don't name it just 'Resource Group'—you'll regret it later.

• Region: What region the resource group will be deployed too.

However, while these options seem very basic—and for the most part, they are—there are some nuances as a newcomer to the platform you should be aware of! The main one is region. Deploying a resource group does not dictate or control the region of the resources you can deploy into it. Resource Groups hold only the metadata; so, while your resource group could be deployed in UK South, you could still have a virtual machine deployed in Australia East within that same resource group.

Best Practice: Always try to keep your resource group and its resources in the same region to ensure high availability of management operations and for compliance purposes**.**

With your subscription chosen and your region and resource group name selected, you then have the Tags menu that we'll cover in a future entry. For now, let's skip to Review + Create to then select 'Create' and complete our deployment. That's it—you have your very first Azure Resource Group!

Lifecycle management

Remember earlier when I said you could technically add all your resources to a single resource group and call it a day? Well, another reason you might not want to do that is to ensure you are keeping good lifecycle management. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say your company is working on an experimental project and you create a bunch of different resources, from Virtual Machines and App Services to maybe even some sort of virtual network.

Now, when that experimental project concludes, those resources will not be needed anymore. Good practice is to then delete those resources to prevent any further spend. While you could dig through the list of resources if you had everything in one single resource group, there might be hidden resources or even some storage that gets missed. While a few missed resources that don't get deleted won't cost a lot in the best-case scenario (depending on what they are), over time those missed resources will build up and equal a much larger unnecessary spend.

Whereas, if we followed the recommended method and deployed resources into resource groups based on the workload or application, cleaning up is as simple as deleting a single resource group. Deleting the group removes all the corresponding resources for the project, ensuring that everything is cleaned up together.

Closing thoughts

To wrap things up, think of Resource Groups as the glue that holds your Azure architecture together. While they might seem like a simple administrative boundary, they are actually your first line of defence in maintaining Operational Excellence and Cost Optimisation. By keeping your resources organised and logically grouped, you’re not just making your own life easier—you’re ensuring your cloud environment is scalable, secure, and doesn't break the bank with "forgotten" ghost resources. In the next post, we’ll be looking at Tags, which will give you even more granular control over your deployments. Until then, keep your subscriptions tidy and your regions consistent!

Ready to validate your cloud skills but unsure where to start? This guide cuts through the confusion to break down the "what, why, and how" of Microsoft Certifications. We explore the different exam tiers—from Fundamentals to Expert—and provide a clear, three-step roadmap for studying, practising, and confidently passing your next (or first!) Microsoft exam.

Getting Started

The New Year for a lot of people marks the start of something new, something we want to improve on or achieve in the year ahead, be that the diet you start every year or maybe learning a new language. For this month's (long overdue) entry, and in keeping with the spirit of starting anew, I’ve decided to cover the ‘How to..’ of Microsoft Certifications: what are they and how do you get certified?

For those who work in the technical space, certifications are a great way to highlight and show off your skills. However, while Microsoft themselves have an assortment of resources regarding ‘Getting Certified,’ for anyone new to the process it can be a bit confusing. I wanted to give my own take on the process and hopefully help someone out there start their own certification journey.

Why get Microsoft Certified?

You can read up on Microsoft’s learn page on Why getting certified? is important. These reasons include career progression and boosts to salary that are great in the long term, especially if you progress into the more advanced ‘Associate’ and ‘Expert’ level certifications.

However, if you are new to the IT industry or wanting to pivot into the cloud space as an existing engineer, getting a Microsoft certification—even if it’s just the fundamental level exams—can be a great way to stand out. You'd be surprised at how many organisations still use on-prem (physical) infrastructure and haven't done any sort of cloud/hybrid setup.

Speaking from my experience, I genuinely don't believe I would be where I am today without having done the AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals. Taking that exam was the catalyst for my transition to working so heavily in the Azure space; the learning material was fresh, it was interesting, and I genuinely enjoyed learning something completely new and it inspired me to move more into the cloud space.

What are Microsoft Certifications?

Now, if you are sitting there thinking, “Great, but I still don’t know what they are,” let’s break it down.

First and foremost, a Microsoft credential is essentially an industry-recognised stamp of approval that validates your level of knowledge and understanding in a given topic area. For this blog series, I’ll keep the focus on Azure, but you can become certified in a range of Microsoft technologies—from the Power Platform to Microsoft Dynamics.

Now there are two different types of certification that Microsoft offer:

1. The "Full" Microsoft Certifications This is the main one—the badge you’ll see posted across professional social media profiles. Think AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals or AZ-104: Azure Administrator. These are generally "Role-Based" (aimed at specific job roles like Administrators or Architects) and are rigorously tested via proctored exams. Once you've earned your certification (i.e passed your exam) you are then granted ‘Microsoft Certified’ for that given subject area.

For Associate and Expert level certifications, Microsoft requires an annual renewal assessment. This is a free, short unproctored (meaning no one is watching you) assessment designed to ensure you are up to speed with the latest changes in that technology for the year ahead. And as long as you complete that renewal assessment each year, you keep your ‘certified’ status but failing to do so you'll have to take the full proctored exam again.

2. Microsoft Applied Skills The other type of credential is the Microsoft Applied Skills. These are relatively new and tailored towards practical, hands-on learning. They validate that you can solve a specific problem (like "Secure storage for Azure Files") rather than validating a whole job role.

Crucially, these are not proctored (meaning they are not monitored by an invigilator). Instead, they are lab-based assessments where you complete real tasks in a virtual environment primarily aimed at educators and students. We won’t cover them in much detail here, but they are worth knowing about if you want to try some hands-on.

Breaking down the different certifications

Focusing on the "Full" certifications, if you look at the Become Microsoft Certified poster, you might notice that they are broken up into distinct categories. It isn't just a random list; there is a structure to the madness. Here is how they stack up:

1. Fundamentals As the name suggests, these are the entry-level certifications (look for the "900" series exams). If you are new to the Microsoft Cloud, this is an excellent place to start. They are designed to provide a high-level overview of the technology without requiring deep technical prior knowledge.

While the Fundamental exams are optional, in my opinion, they are absolutely worth doing. Unlike the higher tiers, they do not require renewal, meaning once you earn them, you keep them for life. They look excellent on a CV and show you have a solid grasp of the core concepts.

2. Role-Based The next step up is the "Role-Based" tier. These are the bread and butter of IT professionals and are split into two distinct levels:

• Associate (Intermediate): These exams test your practical, hands-on knowledge of tools and services. Microsoft generally recommends six months of experience, but I would personally recommend around 12 months of hands-on exposure to really feel comfortable.

• Expert (Advanced): These test your ability to translate practical skills into high-level technical designs. The focus shifts heavily towards architecture pillars like cost vs. performance, redundancy, and security. It is recommended to have 2–3 years of experience here.

  • The Catch: Most Expert certifications have a prerequisite. For example, to earn the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, passing the AZ-305 exam isn't enough; you must also hold the AZ-104 (Administrator) certification.

3. Specialty As the name implies, these are focused on specific niche solutions within the cloud. They are perfect for those who want to deep-dive into a particular technology, such as AZ-140: Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).

4. Business (New!) These are the new kids on the block, introduced recently in November 2025. At the time of writing, many are still in beta. These are aimed squarely at business professionals rather than engineers, focusing on using AI tools in areas like Marketing, Project Management, or Customer Service.

What Certification Level is right for you?

How Do You Get Certified?

So, we know what Microsoft Certifications are and what some of the benefits are but how do you actually get certified? Well remember the Become Microsoft Certified poster? well, it starts once you’ve selected the certification path you want to take. Each certification in the poster has an embedded link to the certification page where it will cover all the details and information of that exam so If you’re entirely new to cloud, then start with the fundamentals. Interested in Security? then go look at the SC-900: Security, Compliance and Identity Fundamentals or for Azure it’s AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals. Whatever your path or career goals, there is a certification relevant to you.

Once you’ve chosen a path or an exam you want to take, this is where you’ll need to put the work in towards that certification. Unfortunately, I can’t do the studying for you but what I can do is help you break it down into three key stages: Study, Practice and Exam.

Stage 1: The Study Process

For most certifications there are a lot of resources you can use, both official (material provided by Microsoft) and non-official (material provided by third parties) and within that, the resources then fall into three different categories. I personally use a combination of all three as this is what works for me, but you might learn differently but these are as follows:

• Microsoft Learn: This is your foundation. It's Microsoft's own free learning platform, offering structured, self-paced modules for every exam on offer. The content is always aligned with the latest updates to the exam material and consists typically of written materials with some ‘try-this’ style exercises.

• Video Courses: As the name suggests, these are generally full video series on the course material with demos and visuals to help you learn. You can use reputable platforms like Udemy or Pluralsight, that are great for east to digest even on the commute to work every morning. I recommended going with instructors or courses from high rated trainers such as Scott Duffy or John Savill on YouTube who offers great study crams across a number of Microsoft certifications.

• Hands-on Labs: If you're like me, I generally learn more by ‘doing something’ rather than just reading about it so rather than just reading how to create an Azure Virtual Desktop, go create one and try to connect it and use it. As someone who has worked in Azure for four, going on five years hands-on experience is crucial especially if you want to tackle those Associate and Expert level certifications, I created a guide in my Getting Started with Azure on how to setup your own subscription for practice at home without breaking the bank.

Stage 2: Practice Exams

I would always advise especially if you have never done a Microsoft certification exam before to practice the types of questions you’ll get in your full exam. While they’re not designed to trick you, they are designed to test your knowledge especially on Associate and Expert level exams where a pass could be the difference between knowing the Azure services that offer regional failover and those that don’t for a particular scenario.

There are a good variety of sites and third-party platforms that offer practice exams, some of the courses on Udemy that we discussed earlier even include their own set of practice exam questions but the ones that I would recommend personally are:

Microsoft Practice Exams (Official) - For each certification Microsoft offer, under each exam there is ‘Prepare for the exam’ section that will take you towards the bottom of the page where you can take a practice assessment as shown in the screenshots below

TutorialsDojo (Non-official) - TutorialsDojo is third-party platform that offers exam-like practice questions as you would in your actual Microsoft exam in a course like format. These are paid courses for around £10 each give or take but having used this site for all my certifications so far, it’s been incredibly helpful and provides clear guidance throughout your practice exams why your answers might be right or wrong with links to official Microsoft Learn documentation.

Whatever platform you use, It’s important to go through these practice tests to ensure that there are no gaps in your knowledge, if you do find a topic area that you are struggling with, go back and do some further study in that area until you feel your more comfortable, there is nothing worse than getting to a question in your actual exam and having completely forgotten about that specific topic (don’t ask me how I know) as that one topic could be the difference between a pass or fail so make sure your score across the different topic areas is as balanced, this will give you the best chances in the exam.

For the actual certification exam (Applies only to Associate and Expert level certifications) you do have access to Microsoft Learn (Open Book) however any time spent here is used up against your exam time so don’t spend ages looking for information, otherwise you might miss out on answering all the questions or have to rush towards the end leaving marks on the table that you do know. Instead, what I have found works well is to flag or mark ‘🚩’ any questions you are unsure of for reviewing at the end of the test. Then using any time you have left, to search for that information to confirm those questions.

Each exam study practice platform will have its own recommended threshold; on the official Microsoft practice tests they recommend aiming for a consistent 80% (A pass is 70% or 700/1000 in the actual exam) but TutorialsDojo has the threshold at 70% but from my experience if during your practice exams you are getting between 70 -80% pretty consistently then you are ready to take your exam.

Stage 3: Booking your exam

Note: I would recommend booking your exam as soon as possible after studying. Don’t do all of your studies and practice then wait something like 8+ weeks for your exam, book the exam as close together as possible. Even if you are getting 65%-75% in your practice exams book the exam a few weeks in advance and by the time the exam appointment rolls around you should be up to that 70%-80% practice mark or alternatively book the exam at the start of your studies and work towards that date. Don’t worry if you get close to your exam date and don’t feel ready, you can reschedule your exam as long as it’s done 24+ hours in advance of the date/ time of your appointment.

So, you’ve done all your studying and now you're ready to take the exam but how do you schedule it? Well, if you haven’t already done so then the first step is setup your Microsoft Learn Profile as you cannot take any exam without one, I covered the process on how to do this on Getting started with Azure, if you have done this step then head to the certification exam page of your choice, in this example we’ll use the AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals. From the exam page, scroll down until you find the ‘Schedule exam’ section as per the screenshot below.

Exam prices will vary depending on region and level, a typical range is around* £64 - £106 or your regional equivalent at the time of writing with role-based exams on the higher end of the scale.

You will then be transferred to the Pearson Vue once you have filled out and submitted the candidate identity page as per the screenshot below.

Once you have been transferred to the Pearson Vue site the first option you will need to choose is where you’re going to take your exam, there are two main options to choose from:

1. Test centre (In-Person) - Travel to and take the exam at a dedicated testing centre, operated and managed by PearsonVue.

2. OnVue (Online/ Remote) - Allows you to take the exam at home or at a remote location in your own space.

Taking your exam

Depending on what option you chose to take your exam, will depend on the experience. If you chose to take your exam at a test centre, then the process is fairly straightforward. Once you arrive at the test centre the staff on site will guide you through the steps and what you need to do, things like phones will be locked away in lockers that type of thing.

However, if you are taking the exam at home then there are certain requirements and steps you need to do to ensure a space within your home meets those exam requirements otherwise PearsonVue may cancel your exam, you can read the full details on how to setup your space here and if this is your first time taking an exam, Microsoft also have a link at the bottom of each certification page where you can take a practice assessment that will run through a short demo of how the full exam will look.

Closing thoughts

And there you have it—my breakdown of the what, why, and how of Microsoft Certifications. I hope this post has been helpful to remove some of the mystery and confusion around Microsoft certifications and encourages you to go for that certification (or two), and I wish you all the best of luck for 2026!

In my first blog entry Getting started with Azure we touched upon subscriptions. We talked about redeeming a free $200 (or your regional equivalent) trial subscription as well as setting up your own ‘Pay as you Go’ subscription, but what I didn’t cover at least not directly is what are subscriptions? and that is the question I hope to answer.

What are Azure Subscriptions

Fundamentally you can think of subscriptions as a sort of ‘container’ for any resources you might want to create within the Azure Cloud platform be that Virtual Machines, Storage Accounts or Databases. Any resource you create will belong to a subscription within your Azure environment. Now notice I said ‘subscriptions’ at the start of this paragraph? well, that’s because you can have multiple subscriptions within a single Azure tenant. By default, Microsoft allows up to five hundred subscriptions per Azure tenant/ instance.

Now if you’ve been following along in this ‘A-Z’ blog series so far perhaps you’ve recently started your journey into Azure and are sat there thinking “Why would I need so many subscriptions?” and for an individual person or even a small independent business, a singular subscription would be sufficient in most scenarios. However, as the size of your Azure environment grows its best practice to add extra subscriptions for several reasons.

Now remember about 30 seconds ago when I mentioned that ‘subscriptions are a sort of container’ and while fundamentally that is true, subscriptions act more like a boundary for both your billing and access control, now let me explain using some examples:

Let’s say you work for a software development company, typically in software development you will have three production stages.

• Development Stage - This is where the Development team will create new features and updates to the application(s)

• Testing / Sometimes called ‘UAT’ (User Acceptance Testing) - Once a feature/ update is completed, it’s then pushed into testing stage before being pushed to Production.

• Production - This is the live/ current available version for the customer and or internal use.

What you would find is that typically most businesses will have either an allocated budget as a whole department or each development stage will be assigned a budget. Each one of the subscriptions will then be divided up around that budget either monthly, quarterly, or yearly from the finance department and then that monthly spend on resources can then be tracked and managed within each of the three-subscriptions.

Access Control

As I touched upon, subscriptions can also act as a boundary using what is called access control, and for the more technical term Azure Role-Based Access Control, or 'RBAC' for short. If you are not familiar with the term access control, think of it like you would the security of a building. Access control dictates who is allowed inside the building, or in this case it sets the rules of what users are allowed to access the subscription and to go one level further it also says what those individuals are allowed to do within the subscription, we’ll cover RBAC in more detail in a later entry but for now I’ll provide some more real world examples.

Let’s take our UAT stage as an example, this is typically going to be looked after by a certain team of Quality Assurance (QA) testers. This team needs permissions to deploy and test the new application code, but you don't want them to have any access to the live Production environment. Likewise, you might want to prevent the core development team from making direct changes to the UAT environment to ensure the testing process is controlled and unbiased.

By placing these resources for UAT in their own subscription, you can assign specific permissions (using Azure Role-Based Access Control, or 'RBAC') to the QA team for that subscription only. The Development and Production environments, sitting in their own separate subscriptions, would have entirely different sets of permissions assigned to different teams. This creates clear security boundaries and enforces the principle of ‘least privilege’, which is a fundamental security concept we’ll cover in a later series entry.

Service Limits

The third and less common reason you would have multiple subscriptions is service limits, and what do I mean by service limits? For every Azure subscription there is a limit on the number of resources you can deploy per Azure Region for example things like the number of virtual CPU cores, and while these limits are very generous and won’t affect most users. Organisations with a large global presence and or requirements would exceed these limits very quickly so by having multiple subscriptions, across multiple regions allows organisations to essentially ‘refresh’ their quotas to scale resources up and down as required.

Final Thoughts

While a subscription is fundamentally a container for your Azure resources; they’re real power lies in its function as a management boundary. Think of them as the primary tool in your organisational toolkit for:

• Billing Separation: Isolating costs by department, project, or environment (Dev, Test, Prod).

• Access Control: Creating secure silos where you can define precisely who can do what.

• Scaling: Providing a mechanism to work around service limits for massive-scale deployments.

Regardless of if you are someone just starting out, or a seasoned cloud engineer practicing at home a single subscription in most cases will suffice. But should you have the opportunity or resources to do so and start to build out more complex Azure environments or solutions, it’s important to understand how to leverage multiple subscriptions. This is crucial for maintaining and organising an Azure environment.

It seemed far too fitting that for my first blog entry that the topic should be ‘Getting started with Azure’ because one of the most frequent questions I see getting raised in various online forums or social media sites is this very topic. People who are interested in the cloud, but don’t know where to begin and I can’t blame them, it’s an ever-growing ever-changing technology and if you’re not already familiar where do you begin?

For some personal context, lets wind the clock back about four and half years. I was a complete novice when it came to Azure and ‘the cloud’ in general, I didn't know my App Services to my Zone Redundancy. If you're reading that and don't what those are either, don't worry we'll get to those. I'd been working as a Lead IT Engineer/ Level 2 Technician for a managed service provider (MSP) who looked after education-based customers. Education is notorious for being a bit behind the times, and my experience was no exception. Everything was primarily on-premises / primarily all using Windows Active Directory with endpoints (desktops) older than me.

Now I'd dabbled in Microsoft Entra (formerly called Azure Active Directory) and the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal for things like Exchange Online but that was about as far as my cloud exposure went, but I wanted to learn and do more with the cloud I just didn’t know where to begin or how I would even begin for that matter?

So how do I start?

Now if you’re reading this and are sat there thinking ‘This sounds similar to my situation’ or maybe you’re completely new to the professional IT industry like I was nearly a decade ago, having just started or about to start your career path to becoming an IT and or Cloud Engineer etc. either way, one of the best pieces of advice I can provide for anyone wanting to get into Cloud, more specifically in this case Azure is ‘You start, by starting’ and before you roll your eyes hear me out!

Think about what it is that interests you, are you interested in Infrastructure? Things like virtual machines and cloud storage or perhaps you’re interested in security? Things like Firewalls, cryptographic Key Vaults and Identity Access Management (IAM). Ultimately whatever your answer, this is what will help you start your journey into Azure and will narrow down your starting point. This starting point is going to be different for everyone; there is no silver bullet to getting into Azure.

Let me give some examples, and we’ll get into more details of the ‘how’ as we go.

1. Let’s say you’re interested in networking, and I don’t mean mingling at a conference, do you know what a CIDR block is, what subnets are? because if the answer is yes then you’re probably already fairly familiar with different networking technologies and terminology and for those of you in this or a similar scenario that knowledge you already have will still apply to the cloud, the primary start point here is to get yourself familiar with some core cloud concepts and understanding the networking services on offer and applying your existing knowledge.

2. But what if you're interested in getting into Azure, but maybe you’re completely new to the IT industry and don’t have any idea about what area to focus on/ interests you the most? Thankfully, Microsoft provides an entire library of guides and documentation, and this is where I suggest you start your journey, get yourself familiar with the Cloud. Understand the basics, and then from there you can start to branch out and experiment with what area of the cloud you enjoy because that broader foundational knowledge will be crucial as you progress.

For both examples there are a few points of Interest I want to highlight as a good place to start. The first of which is the Azure Fundamentals Learning Course on Microsoft Learn, this offers a very high-level overview of the Azure platform covering the different services on offer, as well explaining some of the key cloud concepts and how the platform functions. As mentioned in the second example, once you have that baseline knowledge of the Azure platform that knowledge will be fundamental going forward for anything and everything you do in Azure.

You have two options here: you can book a paid, tutored course, or you can take the recommended (and completely free) route using the self-paced learning modules at the bottom of the page. Each section in this learning path covers Azure's core concepts and services. Since there’s no time limit, you can move at your own pace. For me, consistency was key. I aimed for about 1 to 2 hours of study every other day, fitting it in after work, on weekends, or during downtime. It took me around three months to get a firm grasp on things, but I want to stress that this looks different for everyone. We all learn at different speeds, so if you hit the three-month mark and aren't quite 'there' yet, that’s completely fine. Take your time and don’t rush it; you’ll thank yourself later.

Side note: I would strongly recommend setting up a Microsoft Learn Profile if you don’t already have one by selecting the Sign in option at the top of the page, you can use any existing Microsoft account (Outlook, Hotmail) or any other email address you have. This will allow you to track your learning progress, utilise some other options that I’ll explain when we get to them. And should you choose to do so in the future, register for Microsoft Certification Exams but that’s a topic for another day.

As you work through the self-paced learning path, you’ll notice that some of the modules contain an exercise section where it will guide you through some hands-on experience, like the one shown in the screenshot below. Speaking from personal experience, I really recommend taking the time to do these exercises, if you are due to go somewhere, I’d suggest save them and come back to them later. Generally speaking, they shouldn’t take no more than around 10 - 15 minutes to complete, some longer than others but if you are new to Azure, then these are a great way to start to get that hands-on experience with the user interface of the Azure portal as well gain some familiarity with the different services and what they do.

For each of these exercises, Microsoft provides Sandbox environment that you will need to complete the account verification for as shown below on the left. Once you’ve completed this step, to the right of your window a free sandbox instance will begin to be deployed for you to complete the exercise along with the step-by-step instructions from creation to deletion. What I found helpful and something I recommend is to do the exercise to start with but before you delete your resource to ‘clean up’ after you are done, I really encourage you to have a look around the Azure Portal, be inquisitive and get yourself as familiar with the interface as you can.

Optional - Create your Azure instance

Let’s say you’ve worked through around half of the modules and exercises, but you want to go back over what you’ve learned already maybe to experiment outside of the pre-made sandboxes. Again, completely optional but something I found especially useful as a kinaesthetic learner (someone who learns by doing) the more hands-on time I got, the more it helped me grasp the written knowledge.

So, I decided to setup my own ‘Azure Sandbox’ instance and use it to go back over the exercises on my own and re-create the deployments without the instructions in my own. If this is something you want to do, then you will need a Credit or Debit Card as a payment method, this is a requirement to be able to use any cloud resources but fear not as long as you follow the guidance below, some best practices and utilise the free services available, you'll pay next to nothing. The most I've ever spent for an entire month my early learning stages was no more than around £5 and that was from leaving a Virtual Machine running.

If you’ve never setup an Azure account before, then good news! you will be eligible for a bunch of bonuses as a first-time user.

This includes:

• $200 free credit for your first 30 days, pay-as-you-go pricing will apply after the 30 days, or credit is up.

• Free monthly amounts of 20+ of the most popular azure services, the full list can be found here but some of the highlights include:

  • 750 hours/ month of selected Linux and Windows Virtual Machines

  • 5GB of ‘Hot’ Blob Storage in an Azure Storage Account

  • 500 minutes runtime for jobs in Azure Automation Accounts

1. To get started go to the following link and select the ‘Try Azure for free’ option

You will need to sign in with a Microsoft account for this, once signed in you will then be guided through a setup process. Simply follow the on-screen instructions, you will need to give your tenant a name etc. and you will need your credit and or debit card. Microsoft will charge a £1/ $1 or your regional equivalent as verification fee to verify the payment method; this fee will be refunded back to you within a few days.

• Once the above is completed, that’s it you now have your very own demo tenant that should look something like the screenshot below to experiment with as you please! but we’re not done yet. One of the most common pitfalls I’ve seen from people new to the cloud, is users spinning up some resource(s) then either forgetting to turn off/ stop the resource in the case of say a virtual machine for example or forgetting to delete the resource entirely and then end up with a large charge to their Debit or Credit Card.

  

• To make sure you don’t fall into this same trap, Azure provides some tools to help avoid this in form of billing alerts. These alerts can trigger an email notification that will alert you if your cloud spend is expected to or has exceeded a certain spend threshold. To configure your alert, start by going to the search bar across the very top of the Azure portal page, start typing “Cost Management” and you will see under services ‘Cost Management + Billing’ option, click this.

  

• You will then be directed to a new page, and it should look something like the one shown below. You will likely see two options listed; these are your subscriptions. You should have one called something like ‘Free Trial’ which is your \(200 free credit from Microsoft if you redeemed the introductory offer, and the other should be called something like ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ this will be the subscription linked to your Credit and or Debit Card. If you do have the \)200 (or your regional equivalent) free credit, this will always be used first before any charges are made to your personal Debit or Credit Card, but this credit is only valid for 30 days or until it’s used up so configuring these alerts now might save you a headache later.

  

• Click into the ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ Subscription, and you will get a screen similar to this shown below. To the left of the screen on the menu blade, you will see an option called Cost Management if it’s not expanded, click the dropdown arrow and then click into the Budgets menu option.

  

• Once selected, you will get another screen appear like the screenshot below, as I already have a budget configured the headings under the table are populated. To create your own budget, select the option that says +Add towards the top of the Azure Portal.

  

• Now, let’s create our budget. As this is just for demo purposes, something like ‘maximum-spend’ should suffice but please note in a more professional environment this would need to be more meaningful as typically businesses use multiple subscriptions either for different projects or even production levels. You can find out more about Subscriptions here

• Now that we’ve given our budget a name, we can choose our reset period. This will be how often our budget is reset so either monthly, quarterly or yearly. I would recommend leaving it as the default monthly but again for professional environments, typically this would be quarterly or yearly.

• Next, we have Creation Date and Expiration date, you can leave this as the default, as it’s applied for two years.

• Finally, we can set our budget amount under the Budget details. You can set this to whatever amount you feel combatable with, too low and you’ll be getting alerts in a matter of minutes, too high and you might spend more than you want so I suggest starting with between £10-£15 or your regional equivalent.

  

• Now that we have our budget set, we need to setup our alerts so click Next to the Set Alerts Tab, and under Alert conditions setup the thresholds that you feel comfortable with. ‘Forecasted’ will notify you when your budget is expected to reach the % you set. ‘Actual’ will notify you when your cloud spend has reached that % amount. You could set an actual alert for 25%, 50% and 75% with a forecasted alert for 100% to begin with but ultimately it is up to you.

• Finally Alert recipients will be the email account(s) that you want the notification sent too, you can configure multiple email accounts adding one per line if you have primary and secondary accounts for example. Language can be left as default unless you want to receive the alerts in a separate language otherwise click create. PLEASE NOTE: This is just for alerts, these will not stop or prevent resources from costs. You will be required to manually stop, delete or use automation via action groups to prevent any further recurring costs.

  

• That’s it! you now have your very own demo azure tenant with budget alerts configured to experiment and use as you please alongside the learning material.

Final conclusions

Getting started with Azure can feel like stepping into a vast, ever-evolving landscape—but the key is consistency, not intensity. This isn’t something to cram over a weekend or even a single week. Instead, set yourself up with short manageable learning sessions: maybe 1–2 hours every other day, or even just 40 minutes during your daily commute.

Remember, progress in the cloud is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, explore what interests you, and don’t be afraid to experiment. The more you engage with Azure and get that hands-on exposure, the more confident and capable you’ll become.